As I mentioned in my last post, I went to the local Fry’s recently to get a replacement hard drive. What prompted me to do that was a warning from the BIOS of my computer saying that the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive was bad. I’m glad I listened to that warning. After replacing the drive, I put it in a separate machine to perform a safe erase (using Eraser, which can also be found on SourceForge), but not until looking at the S.M.A.R.T. information using SpeedFan. It told me that there were over 65000 excess relocated sectors, which means that the drive basically was running out of spaces to move bad sectors to when needed.

After this exercise I installed SpeedFan on my main machine as well, and found that I have another hard drive that’s not too healthy. So I may have to go out and get another replacement soon.

I also found a monitoring tool called ActiveSmart, which costs money (unlike SpeedFan, which is free), and can alert you via email or network messages when a drive is beginning to deteriorate.

While I’m on the subject of hard drives, another handy tool is DTemp, which shows you the temperature of your hard drives in the Windows notification area (and can show S.M.A.R.T. data, too). Keeping the temperature of your hard drives as low as possible is important to make them perform optimally and make them last as long as possible.